Saturday, 25 February 2017

Interesting article from Tevi Troy about the varying degrees of conservative support for the un-conservative Trump. It makes a fundamental error, though, in saying that “Never Trumpers” would never support any of his policies. I support many of his policies now and expect to support others in the future, but have no intention of supporting his re-nomination or re-election. That’s the “never” at work here.

President Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser has told his staff that Muslims who commit terrorist acts are perverting their religion, rejecting a key ideological view of other senior Trump advisers and signaling a potentially more moderate approach to the Islamic world.

The adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, told the staff of the National Security Council on Thursday, in his first “all hands” staff meeting, that the label “radical Islamic terrorism” was not helpful because terrorists are “un-Islamic,” according to people who were in the meeting.

That is a repudiation of the language regularly used by both the president and General McMaster’s predecessor, Michael T. Flynn, who resigned last week after admitting that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about a phone call with a Russian diplomat.

It is also a sign that General McMaster, a veteran of the Iraq war known for his sense of history and independent streak, might move the council away from the ideologically charged views of Mr. Flynn, who was also a three-star Army general before retiring.

There are two interpretations of Islam in play here: one peaceful, one bloodthirsty. It doesn’t matter which one is authentic, that can be left to the theologians. What matters is that all of us understand which Muslims need to be identified, hunted, and killed.

Friday, 24 February 2017

The inability of the Palestinians to make peace today, I’ve long thought, stems from their belief that they’ll always get a better deal tomorrow. Charles Krauthammer shares my observation that a famous negotiator has detected that as well:

Take Trump’s casual dismissal of a U.S. commitment to a two-state solution in the Middle East. The next day, U.S. policy was brought back in line by his own U.N. ambassador. But this diversion might prove salutary. It’s a message to the Palestinians that their decades of rejectionism may not continue to pay off with an inexorable march toward statehood — that there may actually be a price to pay for making no concessions and simply waiting for the U.S. to deliver them a Palestinian state.

Cheating isn’t what it used to be. Rosie Ruiz rode the subway to “win” the Boston Marathon, now a woman has cut the course and staged an elaborate ruse to place second in a half-marathon in Fort Lauderdale.

Wednesday, 22 February 2017

The Trump administration is working to undo an Obama-era directive that allows students to use school restrooms that correspond with their gender identity, the White House said Tuesday.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer did not go into specifics on the new set of guidelines being prepared by the Justice Department, but said Trump has long held that such matters should be left to the states -- not the federal government -- to decide.

“I think that all you have to do is look at what the president's view has been for a long time, that this is not something the federal government should be involved in, this is a states' rights issue," Spicer said.

I’ll bet the Dems thought it was quite fashionable to hire Pakistanis to run their IT systems:

Congressional aides suspected of criminally misusing their access to House computer systems owed $100,000 to an Iraqi politician who is wanted by U.S. authorities and has been linked to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Middle Eastern terrorist outfit.

Imran Awan and four of his relatives were employed as information technology (IT) aides by dozens of House Democrats, including members of the intelligence, foreign affairs and homeland security committees. The aides’ administrator-level IT access was terminated earlier this month amid a criminal probe by U.S. Capitol Police of a suspected security breach, including an off-site server housing congressional data.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has reported that while working for Congress, the Pakistani brothers controlled a limited liability corporation called Cars International A (CIA), a car dealership with odd finances, which took–and was unable to repay–a $100,000 loan from Dr. Ali Al-Attar.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA [presumably Central Intelligence Agency] officer, wrote that Attar “was observed in Beirut, Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official” in 2012–shortly after the loan was made. Attar has also been accused of helping provoke the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as a leader of Iraqi dissidents opposed to Saddam Hussein.